by Jamie Mason
• • •
I woke before the alarm, snapping alert with a blaring Where is he? clanging in my head. Patrick wasn’t beside me. I listened for his breathing and reached out for a sense of him in the room, primed for any echo of ill intent from the dark corners. Then the toilet flushed and I tried to laugh at myself, but succeeded in only laughing at myself for wanting to laugh at it. Don’t be a fool. You know damned well you should worry.
Patrick shuffled into our room and rolled back into place on his side of the bed.
“My turn,” I mumbled, and scooched out of the blankets, calculatedly graceless, as if I, too, were barely awake.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind me, I lifted the toilet lid and let it thunk purposefully against the porcelain tank. I braced the vanity drawer for stealth and slid it open to pick carefully through Patrick’s toothpaste, razor-head refills, and floss picks for just a bit longer than it would have taken me to pee. The bottom two drawers took their rifling under the screening rush of water as it ran into my sink. I rattled the towel ring while I pried open the few boxed sundries under his vanity cabinet. Nothing but the usual stuff, in the usual amounts.
I went back to bed and waited for the alarm.
• • •
Sleep recharged us—and in the most electric sense. As the dawn dialed up the light seeping in through the curtains, I could feel Patrick awake in the gloom, but pretending not to be. The energized air tickled like spiders’ feet. He eased up from the pillow, bracing his arm in an effort to turn out of the bed without creaking the springs. I murmured and snuffled and turned toward him, freezing him halfway through a stealthy sit-up. He held it for an uncomfortable stretch while I made a production of snuggling down into a new position.
He eased back down and waited for the radio to kick on.
• • •
“Morning,” Patrick said in the kitchen. It was a greeting neither of us had ever used.
“Howdy, Sheriff.”
Patrick rolled his eyes.
“You okay?” I said.
“Yep.” He put his cup in the sink. “You all done in the bathroom?”
“Um, I guess. Are you going to lock me out or something?”
“I just wanted to know if you were done.” His bristles were fully extended now.
“Okay, okay.” I put up my hands. “I was only teasing.”
I tossed over his car while he showered. There wasn’t so much as a credit-card receipt or a gum wrapper.
I dallied over breakfast with a third cup of coffee and a book.
Patrick’s unease rose like mercury in a hot thermometer. “You’re not going in?”
“Of course I am. Everybody’s just kind of enjoying Jordy being out, though. All last week it was a mini-vacation of tardiness, long lunches, and ducking out early.”
“Must be nice.”
I put down my book. “You know, it really has been. He’ll be back next week, and for the first time in a long time I can’t say I’m looking all that forward to the weekend. For a change, when Saturday comes, this time it means the fun’s all over for me.”
I shrugged and held his gaze steady in mine while I watched him flinch at every reference to Saturday I could work into the conversation. “At least I’ve got my spa day to perk me up. That’ll be nice, right?”
It would have looked to Patrick as if I’d dropped my glance back into my book, but from the corner of my eye I watched him go gray, then flush back to life, then crest over to full sunburn red.
His voice chirped out past a knotted throat, sounding not like his voice at all. He stopped and coughed and tried again. “Well, the traffic isn’t getting any better, so you’re only making that part of the day worse for yourself.”
“It’s okay. I’ll find a radio show to keep me company. I’ve got that new audiobook, too. It’ll be fine. I don’t have any early meetings, so I’m not in a hurry.”
He fidgeted another minute off the clock. “I can’t be late.”
“Okay. Have a good day.”
He started out the door, then doubled back to my side. He kissed my temple, a dutiful hammer tap that rocked my head sideways, and then he stiff-legged it into the garage.
I stared for ten minutes, unseeing, at the blur of words on the unturned page. Then, of course, I took the house apart.
Every scrap of workaday debris was gone from his wake. There was nothing that indicated he’d even ducked into a grocery store or hit an ATM in the past several weeks. It didn’t fit. He hadn’t left any glitter on his collar from Angela or any blatant signposts to his more recent distraction, but he was only as careful as I ever appeared suspicious, which was hardly at all. There had been plenty to find, if you knew where to look. Being my mother’s daughter a good deal more than Patrick ever realized, knowing where to look had never been much of a hurdle. But now there was nothing, and somehow that worried me much more than even the Carlisle man in the blue car did.
The itch wasn’t scratched and I couldn’t even write it off to the fact I hadn’t found anything. The absence of any writing to analyze or receipts to puzzle over or any empty, dust-bordered spots on the bookshelves to reverse engineer, all of that was only part of the problem. There was careful and then there was too careful. And still it wasn’t the Thing. Whatever it was, I’d overlooked it somehow.
• • •
Easter-egg hunts, hide-and-seek, and scavenger quests were some of my mother’s favorite games. Simon loved them, too. I generally approved of the results of the contest, but I was more impatient, more easily frustrated than both of them. In some fit of grace, they were both perfectly comfortable to stand in admiration of other people’s cleverness. Both of them could somehow be delighted to find themselves stumped. I, on the other hand, learned to curse.
“Shit!” I yelled to the foyer ceiling.
My phone rang in response.
I found it and looked at the display before it could drop into voice mail. Of course, it was Patrick. I studied the background photo I’d set for his number, an ancient picture of us in college, one that had made it through the stacks of the scanning project. I tried to remember the last time Patrick had called me on a weekday morning. I couldn’t remember one.
I hit the red button and declined the call. “Yes, I’m still here, you squirrelly bastard,” I said to the screen.
The wine stain on the living-room floor was even more garish in the daylight.
I wandered back into the den. With the possible exception of the kitchen, this room had the most variable contents. Even so, it was still mostly all the same—all the time. The bills and the letters on the desk changed in amount, creditor, and subject matter, but the stack rotated through the same general acreage on the polished wood. We’d swapped out a desktop for a laptop a couple of years earlier, but the computer had been in the same spot since the day we moved in. Current catalogs were where there had been older ones, and all of them had fluttered out exactly nothing when I’d shaken each by its spine. The pens changed color and size as they broke their springs or ran out of ink, but they always bristled from the same cup. Even then, I’d not overlooked the thought to take them out and scan the bottom for any miniature clue.
I had already played spot-the-difference in here.
There was an advantage to not knowing what you were looking for, though. In my mother’s version of the game, when it wasn’t Easter eggs, she’d wind us up with a gasp. Ah! I’m thinking there’s something hiding in this house, she’d say. And I’m thinking there’s fun riding on it if one of you finds it before supper.
Sometimes it was movie tickets, or a new board game, or a coupon for a two-for-one dessert special down at the diner. Once it was a brochure for Disneyland, and another time it was fishbowls for each of us, Mother included, a coppery, chiffon-finned fish turning laps in each of the three. Sometimes she’d even pick one of us to do the hiding so that she could play along in the search for a change.
But before the find, before my inev
itable irritability set in, there was the little thrill of possibility—it could be anything, and it could be anywhere.
The wide-focus perspective forced a keener vision. You played the game to secure a goal, but in the meantime you saw, really saw, your surroundings. By imagining what each thing could conceal (and how it could manage it) you knew it better.
Everything is more yours for wondering at all that it could disguise.
Patrick and I had lived in our house for more than eight years. All the furniture and belongings were more or less in the same place where they (or their equivalent predecessors) had been set when we unpacked them. Certainly there were places to hide things, big and small, but as frustrated as I would get with the game when I was young, I had learned that the best way to avoid the crawling annoyance of being baffled was to win.
I was very good at looking for things. Yet, here I stood, empty-handed.
Perhaps, I thought, this wasn’t a matter of spot-the-difference in this room, or any other room. Maybe the clue was tucked into something more subtle. Maybe today’s game was a matter of spot-the-difference in this life, not necessarily this house.
I turned a circle in the middle of the den and remembered the floor strewn with boxes. I remembered having been concerned that we didn’t have enough stuff to fill up the upgraded space. We were just kids, barely able to afford a real house. I remembered complaining that it echoed. We talked about throwing parties, not having babies. I remembered the alienness of not knowing how far down along the wall to reach for the light switch, and not knowing for the longest time which one controlled each fixture. I remembered the blissful little realizations that I felt at home as the weeks turned to months turned to years. We had been content here for a long stretch.
My mother and I had solidly reconnected in this house, finally. She’d come here to read her last books and tick off the lists of the films she’d missed. She’d been allowed to end it all when she chose to because she’d been here and not in a hospital. She had been grateful to me here, and I’d been so, so grateful for her gratitude.
Then life had slid down, slowly, and in so many ways, to something less satisfactory, and eventually into a lousy mess. But at least in some areas we’d pulled up, hadn’t we?
That was the difference.
Up until recently, we’d been grinding away since my mother died, more contentious, less at ease in our niches. Then we’d been rewarded with the distraction of a windfall: my mother’s legacy fund. We were doing better on paper, anyway. Anyone who had seen us on brash display in these last few weeks would have seen fit, smiling, smooching fools. He’d made such a show of us lately. And I, to try to avoid looking abnormal, would go ahead and dance when he would metaphorically sing so that our audience wouldn’t feel uncomfortable—or would at least feel less uncomfortable. We were about to take the trip of a lifetime. . . .
I’m not worried about the trip.
My eyes stopped on the rich navy portfolio with its slick, gold-foiled logo: Best of All Worlds—Travel Agents and Timeshare Brokers. I sat in the swiveling chair and took the file into my lap. I’d already read through it days ago, which was the excuse I’d used to skip over it today, the very day I was actually looking for something important. I went through it again, page by page.
The tickle got a solid clawing at the back of the contract. When I’d first looked through the file, I hadn’t read every bit of the endless fine print that Patrick had signed for. I had read the itinerary. I had admired the brochures for the ports of call and imagined the day-trips and excursions. I had tried to feel happy that I’d soon see the views in those artfully snapped photos, but with my own eyes—and with my dour husband, hopefully getting happier, beside me. But I had glazed over at the beginning of the fat ream of addenda and agreements and disclaimers that padded the back quarter of the stack.
Historically, my husband had declined every extended warranty he’d ever been offered. He shunned the salesmen’s enhanced-protection provisos and any additional rust, fire, loss, leakage, insect, hail, and act-of-God plans for whatever might get ruined by such sundry. Those crafty deals, according to Patrick, were nothing but scams for suckers who couldn’t say no. He’d said it a hundred times. He didn’t second-guess his well-thought-out purchases, and he wouldn’t part with an extra dime against the possibility of vague what-if scenarios.
But Patrick had bought travel insurance for this trip. The top-shelf policy, too, that covered luggage loss or theft, weather troubles, travel delays, medical emergencies, and provided a full refund or transfer of tickets for passengers unable to complete the itinerary due to serious illness or death.
24
It seemed there wasn’t much my mother hated more than denial. It was lying, laziness, and wasting time all rolled into one tidy sin. And it had only one remedy: stop it. If she ever wrangled the offense, I didn’t know what it looked like on her face. I never felt farther from her than when I was, in her words, leaving poor, old reality standing on the side of the road with its thumb out.
Once I had read the travel-insurance addendum all the way through, I tucked it back into the obscenely luxurious folder and left for work. I ran the radio up loud and babbled a running commentary on the relative merits of my fellow commuters, wishing terrible things on every driver who distinguished himself in any way from the pack of whirring metal boxes around me—from whatever brand of moron would buy such a fucking ugly snot-green Martian box, to the ridiculous hipster singing his heart out, blessedly behind safety glass, to the undoubtedly nice old lady who should have had her license cryogenically frozen to be reunited with her once they’d figured out how to do courage transplants on the terminally flinchy.
By the time I got to my office I thoroughly hated myself.
I had my ID this time, but I went through the lobby anyway, unsure of what I wanted out of a confrontation with Victor.
“There she is! Hey, lady, where you been hiiiiidin’?”
“What’s my name?” I clapped my hand over the photo badge dangling around my neck.
“Huh?”
“What’s my name? I mean, you miss me so terribly all the time. Surely you know my name by now?”
Victor rolled his ogle-y eyes and smirked. “What did that guy say? That Romeo and Juliet guy? He said, ‘What’s in a name?’ That’s my philosophy, too—what’s in a name? It’s all the same. See? Poetry.”
“Hmmm. Shakespeare. Okay, I didn’t see that coming.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “Mmmm. Hmmm. Well, you’re lookin’ fiiiine, Miz—” He leaned in well closer than he needed to read my tag, which I’d let go. “Miz Aldrich.”
“Oh, I doubt that I’m looking anywhere close to fine.” I swiped my card and the turnstile allowed me through.
“Aw, no. It’s all good. Miiiiiiighty fine, just like I said, ’cept I’m thinkin’ you could do with just a little bit of a smiiiile on your face.”
I leaned into his space and thumped my palm on the counter. Victor’s eyebrows did a twitchy little dance to the top of their reach. “You know what I think? I think you practice all the long i-sound words you can think of. I think you practice them in the mirror, actually. And I think you probably do this a lot because there’s nobody around at home to tell you to cut it out. But it’s creepy and I think you know it’s creepy. And for you, it’s funny to be a creeper because you’re bored. And I can see where you’d get bored sitting down in this cave all day. But you know what, Victor?” I leaned in a little farther. “You don’t bother me anymore. So let’s make a deal, you and me. I’ll come through this lobby every weekday morning, and every weekday evening, and twice on the lunch hour, and you can long-i and eyyyyyyyeball me all you want and I won’t file a complaint with”—I leaned in well closer than I needed to read the embroidered logo on his uniform shirt—“Gateway Security. In exchange, you leave everyone else alone.”
His eyebrows found an extra millimeter of distance from his eyes.
“I don’t want t
o hear of one more woman all skeeved out by her walk through the lobby. You got that? You keep your eyes and iiiiiiiiis to yourself. Of course, I’ll be missing out on my daily exercise up and down those stairs, but I don’t need to worry that I’ll gain any weight. I don’t mind being your little thrill if you don’t mind being my appetite suppressant.”
I left him gawping and turned for the elevators.
“Stop watching my ass, Victor,” I called without turning around. A bump and a rattle of keys, then an officious rustle of paper, came in answer from the security desk behind me.
• • •
I don’t know that I felt better exactly, but I’d at least cut the blue wire for a while.
Then, all of a sudden, back-to-back meetings had never been so interesting. I made concentration an Olympic event for the rest of the morning, and in a burst of not letting my mind wander during the second roundtable discussion, I discovered a pretty tidy solution to the problem of a nagging data conflict that had been plaguing our development team for half a year. I earned gold-star nods from everyone at the table.
But I kept talking. I ate up every pause so that no one could gather up their things without looking rude. I had an epiphany for a third meeting just as the chair races were under way, mere inches from setting everyone free. The squeaking wheels and groaning vinyl muffled their sighs as they all scooched back into position at the table, and we planned the agenda for my latest (and last) bright idea.
The clock eased forward to noon. Lunch was calling them. It was screaming at me.
On the way back to my office, I insinuated myself into a conversation about an upcoming 5K charity race even though I wasn’t a runner anymore. Then I stopped by Marco’s office to see if he had pictures of his new baby. He had loads, thank the gods.
“There you are,” said Jill. I could have kissed her. Marco had been trying to get rid of me for five minutes and I was running out of small-talk ammo.